Damaged Children from Katrina - 42% of toxic trailers are sick

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/us/05trailer.html?th & emc=th

Many Children Lack Stability Long After Storm

By SHAILA DEWAN

Published: December 4, 2008

BATON ROUGE, La. — Last January, at the age of 15, Jermaine stopped going to school. Attendance seemed pointless: Jermaine, living with his father and brother in the evacuee trailer park known as Renaissance Village since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had not managed to earn a single credit in more than two years.

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The health problems of Hurricane Katrina children are daunting. When the Children’s Health Fund, whose mobile health clinics have provided the only doctors and psychologists available to many of these families, reviewed the charts of children seen this year, researchers with the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University found that 41 percent under age 4 had iron-deficiency anemia — twice the rate for children in New York City’s homeless shelters. Anemia, often attributable to poor nutrition, is associated with developmental problems and academic underachievement.

Forty-two percent of the children, who lived in trailers laced with dangerous levels of formaldehyde, had allergic rhinitis or an upper respiratory infection, the study found.

More than half of those ages 6 to 11 had a behavior or learning problem, yet in the East Baton Rouge School District children can wait for as long as two years to be tested for learning disabilities

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